Power Plays in the Anti-Semitic Blame Game

As capitalism starts to crumble, hate finds a familiar foothold.

May 6, 2019

Last month’s shooting at the
Chabad of Poway, a California synagogue in a suburb about 20 miles north of San
Diego, killed one woman and injured three others. Before picking up his
assault-style rifle, the 19-year-old male now being held for that attack posted
an anti-Semitic, white supremacist screed to the internet forum 8chan. In the
post, he also claimed responsibility for a mosque fire nearby and said he was
inspired by the shooter who murdered 50 people in two Christchurch, New Zealand
mosques in March.

This horrific connection, drawn
by an American teen to a massacre half a world away, reminds us once again that
white supremacy sees so many of us—in different but interlinked ways—as threats
to be obliterated in order to preserve power. The foot soldiers in this battle
will be white men who have been told in a thousand ways how and why they should
be on top; men who now feel their power ebbing and are desperate to reassert
it, through violence if necessary.

In moments like this, political leaders
and pundits offer platitudes and “thoughts and prayers,” but also leap to place
blame. For Ted Cruz, Meghan McCain, and their fellow travelers, it was yet another
opportunity to point the finger at their favorite scapegoat, Ilhan Omar, a naturalized United States
citizen and former refugee from Somalia, who now represents Minnesota’s
5th District in the House of Representatives.
It is nauseating that Cruz and McCain (neither of whom is Jewish) targeted a
Muslim woman when the Poway shooter, himself, targeted Muslims, but theirs is a
divide-and-conquer tactic with a long, nasty history.

Jews (like me), of course, are no strangers to being
scapegoated for a country’s ills, and even blamed for the violence visited upon
them. But that is exactly why this is a moment for solidarity—a moment to proclaim unity with the victims of violence and the
enemies of white supremacy the world over. The rise of anti-Semitic violence
once again is a reminder that the boundaries of whiteness can shift, and that
groups that had felt relatively safe can find themselves quickly on the wrong
side of those borders.

The rise of ethnonationalist political leaders and racist
violence should have focused attention on the threat of the far right, but
instead, the loudest voices warn of an anti-Semitism problem on the left. In
the U.S., that focus has come from the president, but it has been enabled
by the supposed “resistance” to Trump: the DemocraticParty leadership. (For instance, right
after Trump targeted Omar, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi piously tweeted about
her discussion of anti-Semitism with a splinter group of U.K. politicians.)

The focus on Omar, who
has been the loudest voice challenging
the Trump administration’s
foreign policy (and pointing out, rightly,
its connections to bipartisan American policy of a century or more), surprises
not at all. It is also not news that criticizing Israel will get one accused of
anti-Semitism; nor is it a shock that Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer are more than happy to go along with such accusations. But the
relatively new twist is that those accusations are being used to silence
broader criticisms of capitalism and imperialism.

Anti-Semitism functions as a conspiracy theory. In the
pretzel logic of this conspiracy, a Jewish cabal is causing all the world’s
problems in an effort to further its own power. It has long served as a tool
for those looking to deflect the evils of capitalism and imperialism onto a
racialized group in order to protect the status quo. As political
historian Barnaby
Raine wrote, “It
tells the anti-Semite that the problems in her society do not really run very
deep, that they are only the work of some small cancer to be zapped while
leaving a healthy body intact.”

And it is striking how recent accusations of left
anti-Semitism have functioned in similar ways. Birtherism, for example, and
Islamophobia more broadly, operate in the same conspiratorial shape. The idea
that Barack Obama was a foreign invader, a secret Muslim out to destroy white
America, came alongside the demands for his birth certificate (most notably
from Trump, birther-in-chief) in the hopes that if it could only be proved,
Obama could be removed. America would be, as the saying goes, great again. Omar
actually is a few of the things that Obama’s enemies assumed he was: Muslim, African-born,
and a real critic of American global hegemony—one who intends to change the way
such power is wielded. Her critics, like Chelsea Clinton, have no problem
reading anti-Semitism into the congresswoman’s tweets, yet don’t see how their
own comments echo birtherist ideas that a Muslim migrant can never be “an American.”
(With such attacks from her own party, it’s no
wonder that the right scapegoats Omar—and expects to get away with it.)

Conspiracy theories are an attempt to understand the world—often deeply poisonous attempts, but
attempts nevertheless. Anti-Semitism has been called the “socialism of fools”
because, as organizer and antiracist educator Dania Rajendra told me, “It blames our oligarchy on
Jews instead of ever-worsening monopoly capitalism.” It is not surprising, then,
to see it rising in a time when capitalism’s cracks are easier than ever to perceive
and, indeed, to fall through, even for those who used to feel secure. In the
absence of a structural analysis of capitalism, conspiracy theories can thrive.
And the systematic crushing—often through the use of anti-Semitism—of not just
communism, but of any whisper of an alternative to capitalism, has left many
people struggling for answers to why they feel their security slipping away.

The other side of the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory has
always been the “Judeo-Bolshevik,” the
Jewish communist seeking to undermine and overthrow national governments. As a
new book by historian Paul
Hanebrink argues, this myth animated anticommunists from Winston Churchill and
Woodrow Wilson to Hitler himself, and justified repeated, brutal pogroms
against Jews across the world. As socialism again edges into the mainstream,
particularly in the U.S. and the U.K., it is not surprising that we are seeing
renewed accusations that it harbors a malevolent plot to infect the body
politic; what is strange is that the plot is being cast as an anti-Semitic one.

It is useful for those in power to be able to pretend that
critiques of their power are attacks on its victims—to present Omar and Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn as the cause of rising anti-Semitic violence, even as we
see more clearly than ever that such violence is coming from white
supremacists. Anti-Semitism, according to
Rajendra, “is core to the appeal of far-right political movements, including
Trumpism.” These movements, she notes,
are “looking to galvanize already existing American prejudice against
immigrants, Black people, Native people, and other people of color, women,
trans people, and Muslims,” scapegoating those who often feel the brunt of
worsening conditions for the crisis now affecting a growing number of white
people.

“It’s inevitable,” Rajendra said,
“with such easy access to guns and conspiracy theories and
such difficult access to education and healthcare, that we see these shootings
as well as other attacks.”

But the center, as well as the right, guards its power
through accusations that the left are the “real racists.” If socialism has begun
to lose its scare quality, perhaps some can be split away from a rising left
through claims that leftists are as big a threat to their safety as a violent
right. But safety will not come through isolation, for Jews or any other marginalized
group. Instead, said Rajendra, movements on the left must learn to recognize
and reject anti-Semitic and Islamophobic messages as well as they are learning
to recognize anti-black and misogynist ones. It is crucial to understand that
the “grinding structural violence” of poverty, police abuses, and the ongoing
crackdown on migrants is as important as more spectacular horrors like the
Poway shooting. Only together, she said, can marginalized groups beat back
white supremacy.

Conspiracy theories take off because they feeltrue. The world really is shaped by a
relatively small group of people who have outsized power—it’s just that it’s
not an ethnic cabal, it’s the super-rich.
Fighting racism and bigotry cannot and should not be done to appease external
critics, but because it is part of the left’s fundamental project. Without such an analysis, ideas that feel true to people—whether they are the anti-Semitic conspiracies about Jews bringing
in immigrants to replace white Americans, or birtherist beliefs that Muslims
are plotting to undermine the West—can take root and grow.

Sarah Jaffe is the author of Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt (Nation Books).